As computer technology has progressed and particularly with the advent of the personal computer, data processing has reached every level of society and every level of user. A large body of software has been written for the IBM.TM. compatible Personal Computers. The vast majority of these applications are written to accept keyboard input only or the combination of keyboard and mouse pointing device input. Furthermore, the operating systems which control the personal computers and allow data to pass to the applications also are primarily written for the, combination of keyboard and mouse input only.
Many new input devices such as touch sensors, pen-date displays, voice recognition devices, data gloves and bar code scanners are more appropriate for certain operations and provide a very efficient way of controlling their specifying input to a computer system. Unfortunately, the large body of applications do not understand this type of input.
Commonly assigned U.S. patent application Ser. No. 5,157,384, entitled "Advanced User Interface", filed Apr. 28, 1989 and hereby incorporated by reference, teaches an operating system enhancement which allows existing application programs to understand new input devices. Certain improvements to that operating system extension are described in copending application Ser. No. 07/779,702, entitled "Graphical User Interface With Gesture Recognition In A Multi Application Environment" filed Oct. 21, 1991 which is a continuation in part of Ser. No. 07/344,879 (U.S. Pat. No. 5,157,384) and is also hereby incorporated by reference.
In the future, a plurality of input devices will be operating concurrently on a given system. It is also desired to accommodate the development of new recognition devices which are not presently available. Thus, there is a scenario where many input devices with a plurality of different input events which developers of the operating system or applications running thereon have no present knowledge. Rather continuing to rewrite the operating system or the operating system extension, the Applicants believe it would be preferred to develop a device independent interface. The interface should allow the attachment of new input devices in the delivery of their new input events to existing application programs without revision to the application, program, to the operating system or to the operating system enhancement.